‘Oh, you can’t
help that,’ said the Cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

‘How do you know
I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘You must be,’
said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’

We are constantly told that we live in a
post-truth
or post-factual age. Allegedly, fake news, false claims, and a fading
respect for the truth are sending us deeper and deeper down the rabbit-hole,
tumbling us into a topsy-turvy world where politicians, journalists and your
average Jill or Joe can say, like Humpty Dumpty: ‘words mean whatever I want
them to mean’—and so can photos, facts and quotes.

Donald Trump describes
seeing thousands of Muslims cheering as the Twin Towers came down on 9/11. The
Sun and the Daily Mail use photos of Jeremy Corbyn taking a walk on Remembrance
Sunday with a war veteran, and cut and chop them to claim
that he was doing a disrespectful jig. Peter Jones of Dragon’s Den fame declares
on ITV’s This Morning show that he’s
seriously considering running for Prime Minister of the UK with no political experience
whatsoever—and no-one can tell just how serious he is.

In a fitting testimony, the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) recently made “post-truth" their word
of the year, defined as a situation “in which objective facts are less
influential than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Although the word has
been used before, the OED report that 2016 saw its usage increase
by 2,000 per cent. Our grip on reality, it seems, is slipping.

Of course, there’s nothing new in
politicians who deceive, journalists who lie, and objective facts that fail to
stir the voters. ‘Reality’ has rarely been more than a plaything for those who
have the power to define it, as philosophers like Michel Foucault and Maurizio Ferraris
have explored in depth. All reality is constructed by knowledge and all knowledge
is constructed by power, so power is central to the construction of reality.

Yet over the past several decades, the
relationship between politics, truth and reality has been changing. Like big businesses,
the moment that political parties began to affiliate themselves with
advertising strategists they committed themselves to the primary task, not of
reflecting reality or even working with it, but of constructing political
reality in their own image.

As early as the 1930s, Advertising Age
was claiming
that “a political campaign is largely an advertising campaign.” But it was only
in the 1960s in the US and the 1970s in Britain (with Saatchi & Saatchi’s
close links with the Tories), that policy withdrew to the margins and ‘spin’
became the main event. Increasingly, politics became a game of smoke and
mirrors.

Over a similar period of time the advent
of new kinds of media and technology – mainly the internet and television –
both facilitated and intensified this shift towards appearances. Reality may
always have been a social construct, but in this new techno-setting social
reality has never been so construct-able. “Don’t you realize,” ex-Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi once explained
to one of his close associates, “that something doesn’t exist—not an idea, a
politician, or a product—unless it is on television?”

The aim of constructing political
reality is not only to control perceptions but also to control the boundaries of
what’s considered possible, closing down certain options while making others
seem inevitable. This will be familiar to anyone on the Left. At least since
the 1970s, any ambitions to rein in the market or establish a more egalitarian
society through state action have been dismissed as impossible, unrealistic or
illegitimate. The ascendancy of the market has been placed beyond question as a
simple fact of life. “There is no alternative” as Margret Thatcher famously put it.

In an opinion
piece published in The Guardian in 2015, Tony Blair offered a textbook
example of this form of reality-control. Titled “Jeremy Corbyn’s politics are
fantasy – just like Alice in Wonderland”, Blair ridiculed Corbyn, Bernie
Sanders, the Scottish National Party and all their supporters for “a politics
of parallel reality” that inhabits “an Alice
in Wonderland world.” If you don’t agree with me, Blair suggests, you’re
deluded, if not insane. And by the way, he adds, “Donald Trump won’t be elected
President.”

In the recent US Presidential campaign,
these same tactics were deployed, first by Hillary Clinton against Sanders, but
then against a different kind of outsider: Donald Trump. Over the course of the
campaign, politicians (especially Democrats) clung to ‘reality’ as if it
offered some kind of insurance against Trump’s election. His opponents believed
that the political reality to which they had grown accustomed—which had a
certain set of rules and which ruled out a certain set of possibilities—would eventually
disable his campaign.

Trump won’t win, Barack Obama told
us in March 2016, because “this is not a reality TV show.” It’s a serious
job, he said. Clinton then released a campaign video saying “Stand
for Reality.” “I’m just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain,” she said—unlike
Trump, a plain and proud citizen of the real world. “Donald, I know you live in
your own reality,” Clinton later laughed in one of the presidential
debates. And then he won.

Even now however, after Trump’s victory,
faith that this version of reality will somehow correct itself and arrest
Trump’s rise (if not Trump himself) continues. “Reality will force him to
adjust his approach,” President Obama assures
us.

But will it? The reality Obama describes
no longer exists. Trump has ripped up the rulebook. He has revealed and
instigated a Wonderland world where the conditions of acceptability and
possibility have been reset. In the words of Marine Le Pen, he has “made
the impossible possible.” Make no mistake, Trump didn’t disprove that he and
his supporters live in a parallel reality, he showed that there are only parallel realities—I’m mad, you’re
mad, we’re all mad here, and as a result the centre of gravity has shifted.

Crucially, it is not Trump or his allies
who will have to adjust to this new reality but his opponents. Hungarian leader
Viktor Orbán, for example, hailed
Trump’s victory as a “return to reality” and “liberating straight talk.” Trump
is this reality’s lead spokesperson, its ridiculous Queen of Hearts, Wonderland’s
ruler, with a same fondness for simplistic ‘off-with-their-heads’
solutions.

In science, Thomas
Kuhn described moments such as these as ‘paradigm shifts’, times of
revolution when scientists like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton reveal the world
to be different to the one we thought it was, and all the pieces have to be
rearranged. In many ways, Trump is a cruel Copernicus for our time: much like
Brexit in Britain, he has shown American society to be different to the way
many people imagined it. Unfortunately, for all the lies and deceptions of both
these campaigns, there is no denying the reality of what has been
revealed.

This is not to say that Trump represents
a complete break with the past. In many ways he is only a hyperbolic
continuation. Finally, a system of political reality whose guiding principle is
that everything should be run as a business irrespective of the injustices and
the casualties that are caused—from education to healthcare to countries
themselves—has been landed with a leader who is not only a businessman but a parody of one.

He is a man who sells steaks and fake
degrees, builds garish hotels and golf-courses, hosts beauty pageants and says
‘You’re Fired’ on television; a man who boasts of exploiting workers, avoiding
tax and sexually-harassing women. “The beauty of me is that I’m very rich,” Trump
says. It is a
fitting, if tragic, apotheosis. American reality television seeps through the
screen and onto its streets: the dividing line was always fine, but now the two
are indistinguishable.

About the author

Samuel
Earle is a freelance writer who lives in London. His work has been published in
the London Review of Books, Jacobin Magazine, openDemocracy and other media.
Follow him on twitter
@swajcmanearle.

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